A trip through sex, data, and rock ‘n roll
In December I had to give a presentation on a topic of my choice.
Are you following? Yeah, you know the type!
Predictably, the topic I picked involved Discogs. Yeah, you know me too well!
At first I considered simply showcasing some Venn diagrams or random insights and fun facts gleaned from its raw data but, alas, it turns out that data is only interesting if it has more than one dimension. Prose is not data. Discogs isn’t exactly “Big Data” either. Privacy was another aspect worth diving into.
Months of research via discussions, webinars, videos and articles for inspiration later, I had to conclude that the individual topics were far too deep and convoluted to condense into an informal one-hour presentation for my colleagues.
But at the very heart of this contentious data there was a message I could easily convey: Where does it come from, and why is much of it garbage?
Data is useful only if you have control over it.
As it turns out, many others have realised this too, and there are several organisations vying for this position of power while Discogs, along with other music databases such as MusicBrainz, have been at the forefront all along — perhaps even without knowing it.
What follows is a redacted and updated version of the original presentation.
Testing, testing, 1 – 2 – 3!
OK, let’s get going. Let’s rock.
In this presentation I’d like to point out something that’s been lacking in the modern music business.
It’s not content. It’s not variety, and nor is it sales. There’s more music out there than has ever been before. We listeners, music fans, consumers, customers — we’ve got so much to choose from that it’s impossible not to get lost in the selection of music and songs and anything else that you might want to listen to. It’s overload!
And some of it is filled with wrong data.
